


Get Home

by Shadesmar (orphan_account)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, I don't think this much crying is abnormal, I'm Sorry, Keith has a panic attack, M/M, mild swearing and season 1 finale spoilers, my poor gay anxiety-filled sons, so much goddamn angst, there is crying, they trip and fall over each other many many times, what do you expect if I got stuck on an island i'd be tired and cranky from lack of food too I mean, yes the title is Bastille's Get Home
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 17:52:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7397524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Shadesmar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the wormhole destabilized, the Paladins were set adrift in space. Without their Lions and their teammates, Keith and Lance must come to terms with their differences in order to get back home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get Home

Lance felt metal groaning beneath his feet as his Lion spun out of control. He’d stopped trying to steer long ago, and had shut his eyes as colors careened in his vision.

 

He could hear screaming, coming from all around him, and he realized it was himself who was doing the screaming. It was a ceaseless, terror-filled scream. He couldn’t even stop long enough to breathe.

  
He must have passed out several times, but suddenly everything was still. He opened his eyes.

Darkness greeted him.

“Hello?”

His voice rang out in the metal cockpit. The silence from the lack of radio chatter was unnerving.

“Hello?” He called out again. “Pidge? Hunk? Guys?”

He heard a groan from his headset. A dazed, gravelly voice filtered through the gloom. “Lance? Is that you?”  
“Keith!” Lance blurted out. “Where are we? Why isn’t anyone else picking up?”

Keith’s voice came in spottily, as he was taking deep breaths between his words. “We’re in… an ocean… somewhere. We’re …sinking... to the bottom…”

“Well I guess that explains why it’s so dark,” Lance observed. He tried willing his Lion to move, or shine a light at least. Nothing happened. “I don’t think my Lion is responding to anything, though. It’s pitch black down here.”

“You have to get out…”

“Huh?” Lance shot back.

“The Lions… we’re still sinking.”

Lance realized with a pang of horror that his vision, which had been dark to begin with, had steadily been growing dimmer.

“We’ll be fine,” Lance said shakily. “We don’t need to worry about oxygen running out, right?”

“It’s not the oxygen I’m worried about.” Keith’s response came a little bit quicker, as if he’d realized something urgent. “These Lions are made for space travel.”

“So?”

“So... not for water.”

“I’m pretty sure these things are airtight, Keith.”

“You… don’t… get it. Think about what happens to a plane… underwater.”

Lance realized what Keith was getting at. Spacecraft didn’t need to withstand huge amounts of external pressure: they need only contain it.

“You mean- we’re gonna be crushed?!”

“If we don’t get moving, we will.”

Lance’s mind was racing. This couldn’t be happening. “There’s no way that’ll happen. We’ll get the Lions moving, we’ll figure something out-”

“We have no choice. We have to abandon them.”

“Keith, wait- This is crazy! I’m not leaving.”

“What are you going to do when we hit the bottom, Lance? We won’t have food. We’ll be too far down to swim back up. Our radios will eventually stop working, and then what?” There was a pause. “We have to move, or we’re going to die. Even if we do make it to the bottom and somehow the Lions are intact, we’ll be stuck there. Every. Moment. Counts.”

“No,” Lance shook his head. “No, I’m not leaving Blue.”

There was no response from the other end.

Lance felt tears welling up. “Keith?”

He heard the loud metal clank of metal doors opening, and then a thunderous roar. Silence greeted him as the radio cut out.

“Damn it.” He pressed a button, and water began to rush into the cockpit with alarming speed. Before he knew it, he was being whisked out into the darkness.

He flicked a button on the side of his visor and two beams of light fell upon the sinking Blue Lion, which was disappearing rapidly into the inky shadows below. His throat felt tight with unshed tears, but he wrenched his attention away from his beloved Lion in order to focus on preserving his own life.

Looking upward, he saw the dim glow of the surface. It seemed so far away.

“Keith?” He called into his headset. There was no response. “Keith, where are you?”

He swiveled his head, stopping suddenly upon seeing a human-shaped figure drifting in the distance. Lance’s heart leaped when he saw a familiar red and white uniform.

“Keith!” Lance shouted again, speeding off towards his friend. As he neared Keith, however, he realized something was wrong.

His headset was still silent, and Keith wasn’t moving. Along Keith’s visor was a thin line, where a stream of bubbles was escaping upwards.

Lance kicked his legs even faster, his strokes becoming more jagged and panicky. He finally forced himself to slow down and take deep breaths in order to preserve his energy. The more panicked he became, the less precise his strokes would be and the more likely he and Keith would both drown. He’d been second in his class, which had required great strength in nearly every sport, and swimming was no exception. Now, his training came back to him and helped keep him focused on the task at hand.

Keith’s arm was finally close enough to grab onto. Lance did so and hauled the pilot closer, gripping his torso and kicking upwards.

The ascent was long and arduous. Lance’s lungs burned, and as he rose he could feel popping in his ears. He’d pause every ten feet, or what he guessed was ten feet, and would try to remain level for about a minute or so. He knew about decompression sickness and how to avoid it, but he’d never had to apply that knowledge to real life. He’d learned about how astronauts in the past had spacesuits that were ill-equipped to handle changes in pressure, and how they’d breathe in pure oxygen in preparation for walks outside of their space vehicles. His Paladin suit, however, seemed to adapt to the changing atmospheres in space as needed. But whether or not it was suited to underwater pressure was another story entirely: even as a pilot he’d picked up quite a bit of engineering knowledge, and out of morbid curiosity had watched internet videos of random items being ejected from a submarine at a thousand feet below water. Now, he really wished he’d stopped watching after seeing what had happened to the pack of hot dogs.

Keith’s arms fluttered limply at his sides. The line of bubbles continued to rise from his helmet.

It was too dark to tell if he was even breathing, and Lance felt his heart shudder at the idea of-

No.

Lance kicked upwards. He had no time to worry about whether or not Keith was alive. He just had to make it to safety.

The light was closer now. Every kick brought the translucent blue waves to him.

Almost...

With a splash, he reached the surface and light filled his vision.

...

 

There was sand in Keith’s mouth.

He coughed and squinted in the harsh light. He could tell he was on a beach somewhere. Endless blue waves stretched in front of him, and a dense jungle loomed behind him.

He might have mistaken it for a beach on Earth, except for one thing.

There was a huge pink arc that seemed to slash the sky into two pieces. In the sunlight it was faint, but still very out of place in what was otherwise a perfectly blue sky. Keith stared at it in wonder, trying to come up with an explanation for this alien phenomenon.

He heard a cough to his left. He turned to the noise and saw his helmet lying in the sand, next to a very bedraggled Lance.

The blue paladin was lying facedown in the sand with his arms splayed out.

“Lance,” Keith called out. He tried to stand but fell back to his knees as a splitting headache wracked his brain. He settled for crawling towards his fallen friend.

“Lance, are you-”

Lance’s fist shot up and landed squarely on Keith’s jaw. Suddenly Lance was standing- shakily, by the looks of it- and his features were twisted in anger. “You idiot!” he shouted. “You- you stupid-” he swung his fist blindly and Keith rolled out of the way, his head throbbing in protest.

“What is wrong with you!” Keith dodged another fist and landed one of his own on Lance’s cheek.

“Me? What’s wrong with me?” Gripping his cheek in pain, Lance backed away and focused on defense. “You nearly got yourself killed!”

“I did?” Keith tried to remember what had happened. He’d tried to escape his Lion, but the water rushing inside the cockpit had swept him into something sharp and metallic…

After that, he had no memory.

“I was trying to save both of us,” he said uncertainly. He dodged a swipe and lost his balance, falling onto the sand. He gasped as the wind was knocked out of him.

Lance was on top of him, gritting his teeth in anger and shouting directly at Keith’s face. “You moron! Thanks to you, we’re stranded in the middle of nowhere and we don’t even have our Lions! They’re probably at the bottom of the ocean, so we’ve got no way to contact Allura or any of the others. You don’t even have a working helmet!”  
Glancing to his right, Keith caught a glimpse of said helmet, which sat upside down in a pile of sand. A long crack ran across the visor and water seemed to be pooling against the glass.

Keith let his head fall against the sand. “So I guess you dragged me to safety, then. Thanks.”

“Darn right I did! You would be dead without me. So you’d better-” Lance looked smug, but then his face softened. “Wait, did you just thank me?”

“Yeah. I did.” He groaned. “Now will you get off of me?”

“Huh?” Lance looked down. “Oh yeah, sorry.”

Lance stood up quickly, looking sheepish.

Keith tried to do the same, but his headache had only worsened in the past few minutes of fighting.

“Hey man, you all right?”

Keith grunted a response. “Just fine,” he said through gritted teeth.

“No, you’re hurt! What happened?”

“I think I just… need to lie down for a moment.” His vision was going blurry from the pain. Stubbornly, he blinked his moist eyes, refusing to let them fill. Not in front of Lance.

He felt arms wrapping around his torso. Lance was holding him.

“Hey. Earth to Keith. Hello?” He heard snapping fingers in front of his face, but he didn’t have the energy to even open his eyes.

“Lance… why is everything so… ugh…”

“Come on, Keith. Don’t do this to me. Use your words.”

The headache was still there, except even more intense than it had been before. The pain was blinding, and he barely even registered the fact that he was flailing in Lance’s arms, trying to escape whatever force had gotten ahold of him.

He could hear Lance shouting his name, but it sounded far away. There was just white light, no matter where he spun his head.

 

He was alone in this immense void, and it wasn’t the first time he’d been here, either. He recognized this space, although before he’d only ever been here in his dreams.

But he could ponder that later. From his past experience, there was only one way out.

He charged forward, and with every step he took, the pain would lessen just a bit. Of course, the opposite would happen if he took a step backwards. It seemed that the only thing he really could do was move forward.

 

He realized that the light was dimming, just a little bit. Every step he took allowed shadows to emerge, and he finally saw that he was in a grove of dense trees. As the last of the void dissipated, he spun around, trying to gauge his new surroundings.

“KEIIIITH!”

Lance tumbled into his back without warning, and Keith toppled to the ground for the second time that day with a winded “-oof!”

“Get the hell off me!” he growled, his voice muffled in the dirt for the most part.

“Not before you tell me what’s going on with you. What’s gotten-” Lance cut himself short as he glanced up. “Whoa,” he breathed.

Keith lifted his head off the ground to see where he’d led Lance. He, too, fell silent.

The ruins of a Galra ship loomed before them, half-buried in dirt and overgrown grass. A thick tree sprouted from what appeared to have once been the cockpit, but besides that it seemed mostly intact.

Lance was the first to speak. “This just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it? They probably know we’re here. We’re dead. We are soooo, so dead.”

“Lance!” Keith shouted. He massaged his temples for strength. “I doubt they’re here, or we’d have encountered them already. I think this planet is abandoned.”

Lance turned to Keith, panic written plainly on his face. “Then why is one of their freaking ships just sitting here? Huh? Explain that, Mr. Ace Pilot!”

“Ugh. It’s clearly not been used for a long time. That tree could have taken centuries to grow, just- look at it! We’re alone here.” Keith held his head gingerly, but the searing pain seemed to be fading. “All right. I’ve got a few theories.”

“Fine! Let’s hear them, smart guy.”

“You could stop with the digs,” Keith mumbled. “First one: the Galra and the Alteans or whoever had a fight here. The Galrans lost, and just never came back. Second theory: the Galrans never set foot here, but one of their ships just happened to crash land.”

“Or three,” Lance continued, “this is a trap and we’ve just walked right into it and we’re gonna DIE.”

“Knock it off already!” This was already too much. “Just- let me try something. I think there’s a reason I’m here.” Keith moved closer to the craft, inspecting the hull.

“Um… what are you doing, exactly?” Lance asked.

A hand scanner protruded from the exterior, with a door sunken halfway into the mud. If opened, there would be plenty of room to squeeze inside.

“...Keith? We should probably not mess with that thing!” Lance’s voice raised slightly at the end of his remark, panic resurfacing in his voice.

“I just have a feeling about this,” Keith murmured.

He pressed his palm to the scanner. Before he could even blink, the door slid open.

Lance moaned. “Oh no. No no no no no.”

Keith slid into the doorway, packed earth crumbling beneath him as he dropped to the floor below.

“Just so you know,” Lance called after him, “I hate you.”

Keith was standing in a mostly empty space, which he guessed to be about five by ten feet long. Padded seats ringed the room, and Keith guessed that this ship had been used to transport soldiers.

At his feet was a metal floor, lined with purple strips of light flickering to life. To his left was the door to the cockpit, he surmised, but it was sealed tight. There was a small rectangular arch to his right, and leaning into it, he saw a disused laser cannon.

The noise of shifting, sliding dirt announced Lance’s presence. “Why do I still bother looking out for you,” he grumbled.

“You know you could never bear to leave me. I’m too lovable,” Keith shot back. Oddly enough, this was met with silence.

Keith decided to speak again. “What, you don’t think I’m lovable?”  
“Well- you’re just so, I mean- serious,” Lance stuttered. “You don’t tolerate it when anyone else messes up, but when you make a mistake it’s completely fine! We’re just supposed to forgive the great Keith who can do no wrong!”

“What are you even talking about? I already told you, we had to leave the Lions in order to survive-”

“It’s always the same thing to you! ‘Keith’s way is the best way because it’s for the good of everyone,’ except it’s not! It never is! You don’t ever consider what you’re doing to other people’s emotions- you’re just a robot! Do you even-”

The room plunged into darkness as the door slid shut with a click.

“Um,” Keith’s voice echoed.

“Shit.”

“Let me find the door again. There’s- oof!”

“KEITH. GET. OFF. ME.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying!”

“OW!”

They scrabbled in the darkness. Somehow there seemed to be less space here than there had been with the light from outside.

Keith felt his breaths getting shallower. Was there enough air in here?  
“Hey man. Hey, Keith! What’s the matter with you?” Someone was shaking his shoulder.

Keith was breaking down. Everything was crashing down on him at once: the headache, the fighting, the pain…

He’d left his Lion behind. Without the heads-up display, he’d just been sitting in a huge, metal coffin.

Not unlike where he was sitting right now.

“Keith, are you- are you crying?”

He took a shuddering breath and tried to form a response, but he couldn’t seem to use his voice. His throat was closing up, he could feel it, he couldn’t breathe-

He was going to die here.

A laser blast shook him. A blue bolt of energy ripped a hole through the ship, and through the settling dust, light poured into the ship.

Lance held his rifle in one hand, while his other was outstretched toward Keith. He shakily took it, using it to pull himself off the ground.

“I’m… I’m sorry. About what I said earlier.” Lance looked at the ground. “I know you miss your Lion too. And… you’re not a robot. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s fine, just- thanks. For getting us out of here.” He tried to stand taller, although he knew his face was probably streaked with tears. “Let’s just… we have to come up with a plan.”

“I agree.”

 

Finding a way off the planet was their obvious first priority. However, neither could come up with any immediate solution for that. After many ideas, Lance proposed engineering his helmet to broadcast an emergency beacon to all nearby spacecraft.

“Won’t that just bring the Galra right to us?”

“It’s not like we have much of a choice,” Lance answered tiredly. “But that’s only if I can even manage to send out a signal, and that’s a big if.”

“Hm.” Keith was not a fan of this idea, but there wasn’t any point in arguing over it if the helmet wouldn’t work in the first place. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, then.”

Food, shelter, and water came second.

“We should split up. One of us should hunt, and one of us should look for water.”  
Lance adamantly opposed this. “No way, man! We gotta stick together. What if the Galra show up?”  
“They aren’t going to show up, and even together how are we supposed to take them down? We’ve only got one Bayard.”

“Well if _someone_ hadn’t abandoned their Lion-”

“If _someone_ could shut up and start appreciating how I saved our lives-”

“We wouldn’t even be in this mess if not for you!”

“Oh, so it’s my fault now?”

“Well charging after Zarkon all by yourself didn’t exactly HELP, now did it?”

“I saw an opportunity to attack and I took it! How was I supposed to know that he had a Bayard?”

“You nearly _died,_ Keith!”

Keith was about to spit back another retort when he stopped short. Lance’s voice was cracking.

“You’re always telling us that the team is more important. Everything we do has to be for the team. But you- you’re always launching yourself into danger like you have some kind of death wish.” Lance glared angrily at Keith. “How can you not see what you’re doing? You of all people should know that the team comes first. That’s what… that’s why…”

Lance started sniffling. “Ugh. You’re just- it’s like you’re not even human!”

Keith felt his face burning. “Whatever. I don’t need you anyway. I’m going to find a way out of here, with or without you.” Without another word, he stalked away into the jungle.

Lance stared after his retreating form. “Fine,” he said to no one.

 

 


End file.
